Training Centre ‘a necessity’ – Dyche

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Published:07:30Friday 24 March 2017

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Sean Dyche doesn’t see the Barnfield Training Centre as his legacy, just a necessity for the club’s future.

Dyche admits the money from the club’s last Premier League campaign two years ago made plans to revamp Gawthorpe a reality.

Pictured as work commences at the Barnfield Training Centre are Burnley FC manager Sean Dyche and some of the workmen from Barnfield Construction Limited

But the redevelopment had to be done sooner rather than later, to raise the club to an Elite Player Performance Plan Category 1 and 2 standard facility, and bring the first team, development squad and youth team under one roof for the first time.

Dyche said: “I think it was a necessity, when I got here originally, one of my first questions was ‘where’s the Premier League stuff?’

“’Where’s what it brings?’

“And there wasn’t really anything, so I said that had to change.

“That was my first board meeting. I didn’t know, guaranteed, one and a bit years later we’d be in the Premier League, but I was saying we needed to start building things that mean something.

“To be fair to the board, there were some ideas and plans for the training ground, but it would have been built around the existing building, with improvements to surfaces and stuff, a lot lower key. But the Premier League brought a lot of the plans to light.”

Dyche and the club were criticised by some for not putting all the Premier League money into transfers, but he added: “Now it’s done, it’s easy with hindsight, and we’re back in the Premier League, everyone thinks it’s a masterstroke. It wasn’t quite that easy, there was no magic wand.

“But the planning, the process, the idea of it not just being on the pitch, will pay the club back down the years.

“It is a bigger ongoing concern, and it needed to be.

“It’s a good sized club and needed something like that for the kids, for the future of the club.”